Clothespin Reindeer Ornaments Tutorial

And we had those ornaments on the tree for ages and ages until we had a big move, things got misplaced and we purchased everything anew and had a tree that was more formal. It was kind of a sad time to see the old handmade ornaments disappear from Christmases, but at this point I was in high school and I didn’t mind the touch of glam to our wintertime living room.

So when I was perusing a great online craft sale and trying to break the $25 mark to get discounted shipping, I ran across some wooden clothespins just like we used to make reindeer so many years ago. They were added to my cart with little thought because I knew that this year my tree that I consider rustic chic that features only handmade ornaments was going to have a handful of reindeer on there, too.

For this project you will need:

• flat wooden clothespins (not the pegs)
• wood stain or craft paint
• tiny pompoms and googly eyes
• gold thread (can find in the jewelry making aisle)
• hot glue
• various embellishments

Either use wood stain or watered down craft paint to stain your pins brown. If using the acrylic mixture you may need an extra coat or two to get the color you are looking for. Allow to fully dry.

Take two pins and glue them together. These are the feet.

Cut a piece of gold thread cut about 3-4 inches long and glue it in between the legs and another pin turned the other way to act as the head with antlers.

Glue on your pompom nose, googly eyes and other embellishments. I found great luck looking in the Christmas scrapbooking section for little elements that worked really well!

I also found these super nifty atrificial Christmas tree style pipe cleaners at Hobby Lobby that I turned into wreaths to go around my reindeer’s neck.

And here is the first complete reindeer. Well, mostly complete. I meant to paint some white ‘snow’ onto the wreath to help my reindeer stand out from the tree a bit but just realized that as I was writing up this tutorial!

Right now the wreath kind of blends in too well with the tree so I will be mixing that up a bit… But darn isn’t that guy a cutie?

You can also use red pompoms for Rudolph ornaments, though I must confess on our  whole tree we’d only have the one. Because there’s only one Rudolph, right?

If doing this craft with kids, you can always hot glue the pins and string to hang beforehand and have a big ol’ supply of embellishments ready to be tacked on with a more kid appropriate glue. Just to be sure to have a few pre-made on hand for the kiddos to see where to put the eyes and nose :) I hope you and yours have a blast making these Clothespin Reindeer Ornaments!

Click here to check out some more of my Christmas crafts and posts!